Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

"Forgive me, child. I was listening, but you know how old people are; they drift away with their thoughts."

A hand folded over hers, pressing too hard. "You looked ter- rifled," whispered Pima.

As well she might have, but the girl and her son didn't need to know why. They didn't need to know about any of this. "I did?" she asked lightly. "It probably was a bout of indigestion. That's another thing about growing old, mark my words, girl! You can't eat tuttleroot soup like you used to. Are you sure you won't try any?"

"Don't treat me like a child, Mother! I can see that you're hiding the truth." Ah, she was a smart one, that Pima. "You think the Cataclysm is coming again and you don't wish to scare us."

"No, I do not think so. And that is the truth." A part of it at least, the part that would most concern the villagers.

"But what does the falling fire mean then?"

"Nothing. You have seen shooting stars?"

"I have!" the boy cried, excitement bubbling in his voice. He sounded younger than she'd ever been, and this was the one great good to come out of the terror.

"Signs from the Ancestors?" his mother added.

"If that is what you wish to believe," replied the witch. "They are small pieces of rock from out there among the stars. They fall to the surface, and as they do so, the air sets them alight."

"The air?" Halling's excitement had given way to profound doubt. "But air doesn't burn!"

She smiled. "Rub your palms together. Fast" The dry, swishing sound told her that the boy was doing as instructed. "Do you feel the warmth?"

"Yes." The sound stopped. "But it doesn't set my hands alight. I don't think I could rub hard enough."

"You can't. But the air can. Hard enough to bum rock."

"You learned this in the city of the Ancients?" Pima asked, her tone soft with awe.

"Yes." It was a he. Her people had traveled the stars since time immemorial, and so had Pima's, but nothing could be gained by making her or the boy long for possibilities lost. What lay out there, beyond the blue of the sky, was inaccessible now and had become the stuff of fireside tales, remembered first-hand by few and soon to be believed only by children.

"But shooting stars don't look like what mother and I saw today," the boy said. "And it wasn't nighttime!"

"Ah, but the larger these pieces of rock are, the more brightly they bum. Some of them are large enough to be seen by day."

"But-"

"That will be enough, Halling!" Pima cut him off. "The Wise Woman has given you your answer. Do you think you're smarter than she?"

Wise Woman! If there ever was an appellation she didn't deserve! If she were wise, none of them would be here. The boy probably was smarter than she.

"Let him be, Pima," she intervened. "He can't help himself. His grandfather was in the habit of doubting. Besides, it can never be wrong to question things. How else would we learn? What were you going to say, young Halling?"

"The falling piece of rock we saw?" mumbled the boy. "It looked as if it didn't want to fall, that's all."

Deep within her uncurled a tendril of hope, tremulous and reluctant. She was loath to let it gain strength, because she dreaded the misery of having to quash it. Every instinct she possessed screamed not to ask, never to ask, simply to forget. Yet not asking would be cowardly, and she'd never been that. A blind fool, yes, but not a coward. And it was possible, wasn't it? After all, neither Pirna nor the boy had ever seen a spacecraft reenter the atmosphere.

As calmly as she knew how, she said, "Do you recall where the piece of rock went?"

"In the end it seemed to give up. It dropped into the sea. If you look from here, uh"-he faltered, realizing that the witch wouldn't be able to look-"it's past the Eastern Shallows, but along, long way past them."

The tendril of hope shriveled and died, and this time it barely hurt at all anymore. Perhaps because she'd grown too tired to care; perhaps because the idea of a jumper after all these years had been too fantastical from the start. In truth, it could have been anything, a rock or a simple mistake on the boy's part.

"Well, it won't come back from there, I should think." She forced herself to smile. "And you two should get back to the village before darkness falls. Pima, send the boy to fetch me when your time comes."

"I will, Mother. Thank you."

"Liar! God damn you! Liar!"

The shrieks reverberated from the ceiling, and the crystal Elizabeth had been trying to jam back into place sailed across the room, struck a wall and burst into a myriad shards. The colorful little hailstorm looked pretty. Cheery. Cheery was good. She reached into the open maintenance hatch, pulled out a second crystal, threw it, shuddering when it sprayed from the wall in tiny fragments.

"Liar!" she screamed again, furiously wiping her face. The sobs gradually, madly, turned to hiccupping laughter.

Her hand found a third crystal, and she threw that, too, and the next and the one after that, until the compartment was empty. Silence fell, thick and oppressive, making her gasp for breath. Silence, that's what was wrong with this place. Destroy the silence, and…

And what?

And nothing.

How long had it been? Weeks? Months? Years? She'd lost track. If she activated the mainframe-always supposing she managed to do the impossible-there'd probably be a calendar and clock somewhere, but the glutinous pace of seconds turning to minutes turning to hours was as much of an abomination as the silence. Perhaps more so, because it was proof, staring her in the face and laughing.

"Liar, liar, pants on fire," she sang tonelessly, kept singing, kept the silence at bay with it.

The empty hatch yawned at her as if it wanted to suck her in. She didn't like it. Didn't like this room, not anymore. She pushed herself up along the wall, listing like a wino on a bender. And she'd better stick to that wall, too. She was barefoot, and the floor was carpeted with glittering shards of glass or crystal.

What had happened here?

Who'd-

Her toes struck a hatch cover. It fell over, hammering noise through the room. Had she taken it off? A gaping hole in the wall, emptiness behind. Nothing left. A soft, keening sound settled around her, until she realized she herself was making it and stopped. Looking back at the inactive chamber across the room, she gave a small, tired shrug. The glass door stood open, promising sleep and oblivion, but, like every cad she'd ever known, it would fail to keep its promise. Certainly now that the crystals had been destroyed.

Not that it mattered one way or the other. The technology was so far beyond her, she'd never had a glimmer of a chance of fixing whatever had gone wrong. She'd tried, doggedly, during the first endless weeks. She'd sat on the floor, staring at what looked like eclectic objets d'art, trying to see a similarity to some type of circuitry she might be familiar with and unable to find so much as a trace of damage. She'd swapped crystals randomly, each time hurrying back to the chamber, getting inside, closing the door, waiting. It'd never worked. And at some point-she'd forgotten when exactly-she'd simply given up. Given in. Whatever.

Janus had told her it was safe.

Had he ever even considered this contingency?

"Who cares?" she murmured.

Janus had died more than five thousand years ago. He must have. Somehow she doubted that he'd made the cut for Ascension-he'd been far too much of a loose cannon. Unless he'd simply been the two-faced bastard his name implied, a two-faced bastard to whom the fact that he'd stolen her life was worth a shrug at most. She preferred that. It left room for anger, and anger was the easiest of emotions, one you could keep at boiling point all by yourself. It also was an antidote to the poisonous despair she tumbled into each time she was crazy or desperate enough to contemplate her situation.